I'm glad to hear the practice isn't so widespread. At the same time, I'm not surprised to hear that it happens or that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on tutors when they already spend as much on tuition.
The practice looks insane if you believe that school is a place for learning. But it makes perfect sense if you see certain private schools and high scores on standardized tests as the lower rungs on the ladder of prestigious outcomes. I suppose you could also call it tiger tutoring and see it as an unsurprising part of tiger parenting --- not
necessarily a part of that philosophy, but certainly in harmony with some of its tenets.
IMHO alert: we live in a society that's increasingly over-focused on narrow definitions of getting ahead via defined paths (e.g. we measure "learning" by high scores on standardized tests, we tell kids that everyone must go to college and Ivy League Schools are better, etc.). In these circumstances, the tutoring thing is hardly surprising. It's more a natural next step in the process of escalating the stakes in...whatever these people see themselves battling.
I'd love to hear parental justifications for over-the-top (OTT) tutoring, past what was in the article ("If I am an affluent person, why wouldn�t I help my kid out?�). This idea seems terribly shallow and arbitrary. Help your kid how, exactly? Help him attain your definition of success? I doubt that OTT tutoring plants the seeds of love of learning. Plus, if Mom and Dad have so little faith in very expensive schools, why are they sending their kids there (out of diploma cynicism)? Or is it that they have so little faith in their kids? Or just that they're marching in line with others and not thinking?
I feel sorry for the kids.
No one seems to have told their parents that even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
